A large Richard Prince artwork surveys the living room, which also includes a pair of club chairs (clad in a Great Plains fabric) and a Jonas sofa facing a George Nakashima cocktail table; the rug is a Thomas O’Brien design for Safavieh.

A large Richard Prince artwork surveys the living room, which also includes a pair of club chairs (clad in a Great Plains fabric) and a Jonas sofa facing a George Nakashima cocktail table; the rug is a Thomas O’Brien design for Safavieh.

A large Richard Prince artwork surveys the living room, which also includes a pair of club chairs (clad in a Great Plains fabric) and a Jonas sofa facing a George Nakashima cocktail table; the rug is a Thomas O’Brien design for Safavieh.

This article originally appeared in the June 2015 issue of Architectural Digest.

Few things are simpler than the pleasures of a summer day: golden sun, rustling breezes, kaleidoscopes of shade. When the location is the South Fork of New York’s Long Island, add ocean-salted air to those attractions. But that atmosphere can be as elusive as a butterfly to capture and enjoy to the fullest. What one requires is a well-designed net, such as the seven-acre compound in Bridgehampton that was created a few years ago for a Manhattan psychologist, her investor husband, and their two daughters. It’s a getaway that the couple says “lives the way we like to live,” meaning easily but with loads of style.

Alternating pale-gray brick walls with weathered tongue-and-groove cedar siding, the single-story, 4,500-square-foot main house seems to rest quietly amid tall grasses, as attuned to the natural world as it is respectful of it. (The building has been certified LEED Gold.) Its understated beauty comes as no surprise considering that the homeowners worked with a team of professionals who are masters of low-key elegance: architect Deborah Berke, interior designer Thomas O’Brien of Aero Studios, and landscape architect Alec Gunn, all based in New York City.

“Early in the process with the clients, we did a significant amount of site planning,” Berke recalls, noting that a primary concern was, “How do we nestle the house into this property so that it feels completely right?” The clients had been vacationing here for nearly 20 years, in a 1970s dwelling by Norman Jaffe, the late East End modernist, and though they loved the home—they were married there—it could no longer accommodate them and the multitude of relatives who make frequent visits. “I’m one of five siblings, and my wife is one of four,” the husband explains. “So in the summer, it’s all about family.”

A Bridgehampton, New York, house devised by the architecture firm Deborah Berke Partners, with interior designer Thomas O’Brien of Aero Studios, nestles into serene gardens by Gunn Landscape Architecture.

Thus was born the idea of a compound, an inviting assortment of buildings of varying sizes, shapes, and uses, all spread out and strategically placed. Berke thought a bigger house should be built where the Jaffe structure had long stood, close to the property’s largest tree, a towering maple estimated to be up to 125 years old. Shifted and repositioned, the Jaffe is now used for visitors, joining a Berke-designed greenhouse, pool pavilion, and two guest cottages.

Responding to the couple’s desire for an indoor-outdoor lifestyle, Berke made the new main house open in every direction, with mahogany-framed glass doors and sliding walls taking in curving beds of ornamental grasses, flowering shrubs, and perennials that give way to a clipped lawn, a fescue meadow, and thick woodlands. The master bedroom faces east so the rising sun can be the couple’s alarm clock. Bluestone floors extend outside to become terraces and in-between places—a screened porch and exterior dining areas—while clerestory windows provide air circulation without buffeting winds. “It’s almost like the house breathes,” observes the wife.

Just as Berke incorporated summer pleasures into the building’s elements, O’Brien translated the experience into furnishings. The decorator had worked with the clients on previous residences and has guided their aesthetic evolution. In the beginning they were committed to French modernism and the work of Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé. O’Brien introduced them to other midcentury Europeans, namely Italians Paolo Buffa and Carlo Mollino, and roughly contemporary Americans like Harry Bertoia, several of whose sound sculptures are on
display, and George Nakashima. Significant pieces are paired with lively but less dear companions (the study’s Luisa and Ico Parisi executive desk topped by a driftwood lamp, for example), in the manner of disparate guests seated next to each other to encourage unexpected conversation. “I like rooms to be weighted with important stuff, but it’s really about what’s good and what’s handsome,” the designer says.

Gestures familiar to anyone who has spent summers by the sea bring additional depth to the interiors: Walls are covered in hemp or in woven silk that recalls grass cloth, and kitchen stools resemble seats on sport-fishing boats. Collected over decades by the clients, the art follows tonal and textural suit, from sepia-tone Louise Bourgeois engravings in the living room to the entrance hall’s chunky mahogany Alexandre Noll sculpture.

The grounds have a similarly casual attitude. “Not too precious,” Gunn, the landscape architect, says, noting that the clients wanted the property to have a generous spirit and be low maintenance. The site meanders, with only gentle directives to encourage what Gunn calls “a sense of wonder.” The plantings were carefully considered, in part to satisfy the LEED requirements, and they include drought-resistant wildflowers and meadow grasses; a purple-flowered wild bermagot grows close to the house, its citrus scent wafting in through the open windows.

“Soulful” is how the wife describes this familial getaway, and she points out that though the new house is only three summers old, its rooms and the land they reach out to seem to have matured together over generations. Given today’s culture of impatience, O’Brien observes, “It’s more common that someone just wants a house done quickly”—but as proved so appealingly here, a contemplative approach can result in a family retreat of rare distinction.

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